Heat and mass transfer in a solar tunnel dryer: Modelling and simulation

This paper presents a solar tunnel dryer which consists of three compounds, solar collector, fun and a thin layer tunnel dryer. The advantages of this system is environmental protection, energy saving and low operation cost. Outlet solar collector air is reheated upon a demand before to be forced in the tunnel dryer to take moisture by evaporation from a wet basis. The Henderson and Pabis mathematical model has been used to describe the drying kinetics of mint leaves, air temperature and velocity effect on the drying model constants was determined using experiments result and regression analysis techniques. The drying experiments were performed at a forced air inlet tunnel temperature and velocity ranging from 40°C to 60°C and from 0.1 m/s to 0.5 m/s respectively. A dynamic model based on heat and mass transfer in a solar tunnel dryer is developed and numerically resolved using the finite volume method.